Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (17 page)

We had breakfast in a restaurant on the border between Soho and Tribeca—a bright room with handsome waiters—beside a table covered with pies and cakes, the glint of silver, water glasses, mirrors, chrome, the plates of waffles smothered in cream and apples, the busy, bright, expensive air of a Sunday brunch in New York around us. Later, when we had finished grocery shopping and walked back to the loft, he turned and asked me if I’d ask a friend of ours Matthew very much liked to visit. The friend and I went the next day. Matthew came out, nicely dressed, on his feet, and entertained us. (“Ah, he is much better when you are here!” said Emmanuel.) We talked of Fire Island, summer, fashion. I asked where to find good khaki pants. Then he pulled up his blouse to show us the permanent IV that had been surgically implanted in his chest: a plastic plate below his collarbone to which the tubes were attached. He hooked himself up. The nurse came twice a week. His mother—a gray-haired, bespectacled woman with a gentle voice—went into the kitchen to clean up, and, when she had finished that, came out and began to Windex some of the windows at the end of the loft. “How dirty they get,” she said when I passed her on my way out—as if that were the only grime that had accumulated in Manhattan, I thought.

“He was wonderful,” I said to my friend on the street.

“Very wonderful,” he said. Then he shuddered. “I didn’t like seeing that thing, though.”

“I thought he looked wonderful, too,” I said.

“I thought he looked awful,” said my friend.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Emmanuel said when we took a walk to the Hudson River down the same street the next day, and crossed to the Esplanade, busy with cars, bicycles, and boats offshore. “I feel I am just maintaining myself, just trying not to die. It’s very strange.” He said this in the same calm voice he used for everything: dispassionate, detached. I did not ask if he resented having to care for Matthew, after trying to get him to leave; or if it frightened him to see in Matthew the progress of an illness he had; or if he ever thought the evenings at the Saint, the baths, the drugs he had taken because they amused Matthew, were what had caused all of this. There was no point. They were stuck together now; something unforeseen had imprisoned them in that loft, just two of many tragedies being played out in rooms all over the city, scenes that would never make the newspaper, or even the gossip of the dinner table, because they were exactly what everyone wanted hidden behind walls. Pain, Hannah Arendt wrote, is the last private thing.

A few months later Matthew decided he’d had enough of pain, of tubes, medications, and vomiting. One Saturday he announced his decision to refuse the fluids that were keeping him alive. He called his doctor. The doctor did not disagree. So on a Saturday afternoon, one of those Saturdays when Matthew used to stand behind the counter at Bloomingdale’s helping women select the correct face powder and blush, he opted out—and by the following morning, around six A.M., on a day when, years before, he and Emmanuel had been dancing to what was called Sleaze Music at the Saint (the best music, the music you wait all night for, the music that comes only at the end of an evening, that is finally relaxed, sensual, melancholy, the cream of the night), he died.

“He never complained,” Emmanuel wrote. “He did it all, and his mother, too, with dignity. During the night he said a few things—It’s dark, I’m scared, Hold my hand!—but that was all. In the early morning, he died, and we called the police. The police came. Then the undertaker—from Soho—a woman in Norma Kamali—put him in a bag. Very chic. His mother left yesterday after his cremation and when I walked her to the cab, she said to me: ‘I think the reason I was put on earth was for these last two months.’”

By this time Emmanuel was himself sick. After ringing the bell and climbing the stairs, I would see him open the door with his little sing-song of welcome (“
Bon jour
”), take off my shoes, and follow him into the kitchen for the chicken or steak he usually prepared. Emmanuel was so well mannered, so uncomplaining, that after he’d served you dinner at a little table, and we’d retired to the big overstuffed sofa in the main section of the loft, he would pull over the dolly on which his IV medicine hung in plastic bags, insert the needle into the indwelling catheter, and we’d go right on talking about books, mutual friends, with perfect equanimity, like the guests at the end of
Quo Vadis
who go on conversing while Petronius bleeds to death. He was also very funny. One day as we sat there talking, with Emmanuel connected to his IV drip, I said that gay men seemed to think that at least oral sex was safe, and he said, “Then you can suck me.” That put the issue in a way that brought me up short. Each time I visited Emmanuel I did so with my breath held—excited to see him, admiring his aplomb, fearful and horrified. Afterward, the moment I was on the street, I felt equal parts admiration and depression.

When Matthew died Emmanuel was seeing a therapist; and—at either the therapist’s suggestion, or his own inspiration—he began to write a book. (When the writer Robert Ferro first revealed his illness, my first reaction was: “You must keep a journal!” But this suggestion, like the idea that facing death will produce great art, ignored the fact that writers cannot, really, choose their subjects. Robert ended up not keeping a journal at all; he wrote a novel instead; it was Emmanuel who kept a record.) I was sure he would tell the story of Matthew’s death in it. But true to that reserve, that sense of dignity, that tone of ironic calm with which Emmanuel’s book,
Mortal Embrace
, is imbued, he did not. He changed their names, though the mother had since died, and dealt with what could have formed the libretto of a three-act opera in a few phrases. But the experience of Matthew’s illness and death, he admits in his book, changed him forever; and gave him the courage, or inspiration, to go on himself.

This project was only one of the things that made visiting Emmanuel, alone in the loft now, unlike visiting anyone else I knew with AIDS: the manuscript’s acceptance by an editor at Farrar Straus, praise for it from Susan Sontag and Richard Howard, publication in France, a trip back to Paris to appear on the TV show
Apostrophes.
The appearance on
Apostrophes
made Emmanuel’s struggle with AIDS almost glamorous. Yet the assumption he speaks of at the outset of
Mortal Embrace
—that all people with AIDS will die, the assumption that everyone around the person with AIDS has—was also mine.

Still, now that his fifteen minutes of fame had arrived, Emmanuel had become one of those people granted the Faustian bargain: The thing that was giving him success was the same thing that was killing him. “Living with AIDS” is the subtitle of the book—and that’s exactly what he was doing. His nurse, he said, was a macabre man who came once a week to change medicines (and tells the narrator of
Mortal Embrace
about how poorly his other patients are doing). Emmanuel told me about running into a well-known man on the AIDS fund-raising circuit one day in a doctor’s waiting room. He wondered about the competence or incompetence of an editor. All this, as Emmanuel’s book came to be, made dinners with him fun. The wit remained. The day the
Times
ran an article by another writer with a book out about AIDS, he put the paper down, turned to me and said, “But I have more lesions than he does.”

His book spoke of emotions no one else had admitted to: his anger at people who were still healthy, his fear that Matthew’s illness had sapped his own strength, his guilt after Matthew allowed himself to die that Matthew had done so for him, his feeling that AIDS had rescued him from the “mediocrity and materialism” of his previous life.

But when the sun went down, and he put on Strauss’s “Four Last Songs,” and we retired to the sofa in that big room where once the Brazilians and Argentines had played, and Matthew had died, it was hard not to escape the image Emmanuel summoned up at the end of
Mortal Embrace
: Hitler’s bunker.

Emmanuel’s loft was on the southernmost corner of Soho, on the fifth floor of a building one approached across a narrow street lined with an apartment building that an artist had painted a beautiful turquoise, a basketball court and playground, an empty, weed-grown lot, and, beyond them, the spires of lower Manhattan over which the moon would rise. Its long row of windows looked out on a beautiful skyline. But all I could think of when I looked back from the street was how its occupants had been reduced to one. Now his only company was his book.

It was some company: the praise from Sontag, the appearance on
Apostrophes
, the letter from Roger Straus expressing his sense of honor at publishing it. All these were the things a writer dreams of, and they were coming true for Emmanuel; so that when the book finally did appear, and I opened up the
New York
Times Book Review
one Sunday, and found, along with Paul Mo-nette, Emmanuel himself staring out at me, there was something anticlimactic about it all—especially when the review sounded a note that was in almost all the American reviews of
Mortal Embrace
: Emmanuel had overdone the military metaphor. When I protested that this did not matter, Emmanuel replied, calmly and sweetly, “But it means my book is a failure.”

Perhaps—but it was still a very handsome book I found in stacks in a store on the Upper West Side my last visit to New York, when no one answered Emmanuel’s phone, and I did not even see him. After I left New York I got news of Emmanuel through others. My last letter to him he did not answer. Then one day Jorge called and said that Emmanuel was in a coma in St. Luke’s. The virus had reached his brain. His father and stepmother and sister had come from France. He came out of the coma, he was sent home, and there, in that loft, his stepmother took him in her arms, and sang him a lullaby as he died. At the end of
Mortal Embrace
, Emmanuel said that his real home was not the loft, or New York, but the French language. Still, I could not help but think: His Romance with America had killed him.

T
UESDAY NIGHTS WE meet in a Quaker meetinghouse on a quiet residential street in Gainesville—a city in north-central Florida—just two blocks from the campus of the university. The discussion group is several years old. “It started out at The Drugstore,” says a friend who has gone to it intermittently since the beginning, “and it was
won
derful. Kids would come in and say, ‘I think I’m gay, but I’m not sure.’ People would
weep.
It was so moving, and wide open. But then everything was in those days,”
this nostalgic hippie sighs. “Then it was taken over by an assistant professor who used it as a
trick farm
[the sixties becoming the seventies] until one night he found himself speaking to an empty room [the seventies becoming the eighties]. He had slept with everyone, you see. So it lay fallow for a while, and now it’s in its third phase. More sober and level-headed, but without those
won
derful moments of revelation.” Indeed there is something middle-aged about the group run by a doctor who, amazingly, comes up each week with a new speaker, topic, or film. The core group of faithful attendants comprises a psychiatrist, a schoolteacher, a writer, a librarian, a retailer, an attorney, and only occasionally—in the fall, when students come back to school—the freshmen who spill their souls (as in the old days) in a frenzy of coming out, and then never appear again. Where they go I do not know. The once-competing organization of gay and lesbian students at the university is now defunct; a charismatic leader, since graduated, has not been replaced by anyone, and a quarrel over funds with the student government has left its speaker’s program in disarray.

There are always a few wild cards, too, on Tuesday nights, and that is part of the reason one goes: to see the person you’ve never seen before, or the ones who come every three months or so; the recently arrived student or assistant professor who knows no one in town yet and brings with him a burst of northern energy from Ann Arbor or Berkeley, and then vanishes again. But mainly one finds The Group—of ten or twelve men who come every week and even dine together in a different restaurant each Thursday, and who constitute what a golf foursome or poker club must have for my father: a dependable bunch of men with whom one can relax, unwind, and talk on a weekly basis. For what I prize most about this evening, perhaps, as I sit beside a whirring fan in summer, or a space heater on cold nights, is what characterizes this particularly leafy street, this plain wooden house: a certain camaraderie and calm.

The house is shared—someone said—by a fugitive family from Central America, but I have no way of knowing if this is so, since we are the only ones in it on Tuesday nights. But this rumor emphasizes the marginal, sub rosa nature of our shared identity . . . even within the homosexual population itself. There must be three to five thousand gay men in Gainesville, but here at the meeting there are only twenty or so. I have friends in this town who wouldn’t be caught dead here on Tuesday nights. Ten years ago I would never have come to a meeting of this sort. People who belonged to groups like this, or went to the gay churches, were, I assumed, people who did not have the nerve to look for a partner in the actual world: the baths, beaches, and bars. In the old days tricking was the way we met people. But things are reversed now. The idea of tricking seems absurd. The mating dance has slowed down considerably. Everyone here hopes he will meet someone, I suppose—though most of them are attached already; perhaps only when the problem of sex has been solved does one have time or energy to spare for its sublimations. But that does not explain Gaytalk entirely. To meet somebody may be the reason I went to my first meeting—a reason reflected in the behavior of lesbians who come once, find no other women, and do not return—because the bars in Gainesville are cliquish (friends talking to each other, while the hapless stranger swims around like a penguin among ice floes that are already occupied). But the second time I came—after giving up, and going back to the bars for a year—I was having an AIDS anxiety attack.

That night, by coincidence, a male nurse from Ocala was giving a talk on this subject, and having fears aired in this manner helped, the way calling the Gay Switchboard—though you use it only once or twice in your life—in a strange city helps. The third time I went back, it was a blend of these two motives: fear and longing. Fear and longing seem to cancel each other out these days. Fear and longing are, furthermore, played out differently in a town this size, which doesn’t provide the vacuum of anonymity a city like New York does—a vacuum through which sparks fly so easily—because the man you go home with will almost surely be in the bar the next night. But fear and longing persist, and this place seems the perfect compromise. Here the plague seems a bit removed, as I listen to a lecture on Michelangelo on this plain wooden folding chair as the fan whirs and I watch a student come back to the boardinghouse next door, his blond head passing under the porch light. I feel, in fact, as if I’m in church.

From the first time I went, I have considered this a sort of prayer meeting, in fact. The gathering together, the communion (of minds), the calm, the straw basket that is passed afterward to obtain donations, all remind me of church. No one stands up to confess deep dark secrets, or testifies, but there is, on our folding chairs, beside the fake pine-paneled walls, under a bulb in the ceiling, the atmosphere of an evening service in some country church. Here for an hour passion is transcended, if that is not too fancy a way of putting it. Here for a moment we enjoy what a friend in New York (who greets with joy an inclination to go to the movies instead of the baths) would call “a neutral activity.” Here we do something that does not center around cruising. That, for gay men, is church. Gay men, of course, went to church as much as other children, but when they grew up, found themselves outside the church and the culture they were otherwise part of. Hence Dignity, the gay synagogue, AA, psychiatrists, gay books, and Gaytalk on Tuesday nights. Times have changed, and changed radically, but each one of us is still trying to find the same old things: sex, and love, and self-respect.

Sex, love, and self-respect are hard enough to balance in life, period, without having to do it as a person whose biological identity seems at variance with his sexual one. How to integrate our homosexuality with the rest of our selves, our lives—our family, our society, our upbringing—was a problem a minority, not a majority, of the gay men I knew were able to solve before the plague. Most of us just kept everything in compartments. Most of us led double, triple, quadruple lives, changing costumes as actors do, masking our intelligence, emphasizing our bodies, feeling our fate depended on the shape of our mustache, the size of our dick. But you can juggle the apples of discord only so long. When desire begins to burn off, like morning haze, it leaves the rest of our personalities more visible. “I’ve read all of Proust and Henry James, I just got a promotion at the bank to systems manager,” a friend wrote me in 1977. “So what am I doing at four A.M. in Sheridan Square, hailing a cab with shit on my dick?”
Having the time of your life,
I would have answered had we both been twenty-one. But we were not, and that was part of the problem: What youth and lust camouflage, age and abstinence bring into relief—the contradictions of being gay. The plague has only increased the vividness of the questions in those who’ve survived thus far. It has made dangerous the sex that was used to answer all doubts, cater to all moods, avoid all problems. “I belong to a GMHC Safe Sex Study Group,” the friend who had his moment of truth at four A.M. in Sheridan Square in 1977 writes me this week. “Everyone is either a little or very crazy, and all ask the same question: If every gay man in the Rancid Apple is terrified of getting AIDS, why can’t these dizzy clones settle down and play house with one another?”

It’s one of the questions I think about as I sit in the Quaker meetinghouse, miles from the epicenter, but still part of the plague. (“The virus is here, in the community,” says one of the doctors. Just recently, three men died of AIDS in Gainesville in one week.) When the plague began, I thought homosexual society would wither away—if men could not sleep with one another, why would they go out to baths, bars, or beaches? I was wrong. There is still some need to be together—even to hear someone deliver a book report on Kaplan’s biography of Walt Whitman, or a history of the Mattachine Society. The topics vary in importance, no doubt, to each individual. A graduate student describes a study of early childhoods of people who later became homosexual. The next week a lawyer explains the mechanics of making wills in which a homosexual partner is the beneficiary. A psychiatrist surveys the APA’s definition of homosexuality over the years. A man reviews local political candidates (pointing out that a public endorsement by our group may in fact harm, rather than help, the candidate we prefer). The pastor of the local gay church speaks, followed by a woman from a local department store who lectures on cosmetics. A teacher discusses the various charitable drives (Toys for Tots, Food for the Indigent on Thanksgiving) the group might participate in. A doctor brings in his favorite opera records. Another doctor, his favorite wines. In its improvised, eclectic course, the group moves for- ward like some snail, incorporating whatever enters its path, feeding on its members’ expertise, which is more fun, I think, than something more strictly political. That would be too narrow. Homosexuality is more than politics; and more than sex; and under the ceiling bulb, while the students float by on bicycles outside on green summer evenings, this quiet room seems very much like Life. Moments of exquisite boredom (the classroom clichés of the visiting psychologist) are followed by breathless revelation—the student who lists his reasons for not telling his parents he’s gay, and then tells us what his fraternity brothers said when he told them. These are the stories I love to hear. At the end of each meeting, we are asked to go around the room and introduce ourselves. Then the straw basket is passed from person to person, the speaker is thanked and applauded, and we stand up and talk to friends. When I first came here, I had none and fled to my car in a paroxysm of shyness—something newcomers still do—but now I linger with the rest on the sidewalk outside, like any congregation.

The modest, unstated proposition that Gaytalk rests upon is this: that the rational (Come, let us reason together) can bring into focus what is irrational (Eat my big dick, you worm). “I was a problem,” said Oscar Wilde, “for which there was no solution.” But sitting here listening to men of different ages, circumstances, talk about their version of the problem, one feels that if there is not—to the problem of Life, either—it is pleasing nonetheless to assume we can reach one. Hearing them argue is an opportunity to stand back from the bewildering contradictions of being gay—to put things in perspective, to talk, as reasonably as possible, about things that may not be reasonable at all in real life. When we leave the Quaker meetinghouse, I feel a magic circle has been broken. For beyond the screen door is the real world, with its separate compartments, its balancing act.

In fact most of us get in our cars after the discussion, drive straight to the bar, and regroup inside its very different environment, talking to one another as our eyes roam the room, checking out the patrons who did not come to Gaytalk. (The modest, unstated proposition the bar rests on is: Everything can still be solved with a lover.) Would Gaytalk be pointless without the Ambush afterward? Would it be possible if once every six weeks I couldn’t drive to the Club Baths in Jacksonville—where men meet, but do not discuss much? (There’s a Gaytalk that takes place in steamrooms.) I don’t know. It’s useless to pretend that sex is
not
at the center of homosexual life—the reason these men want to be with one another—and yet at this point in time it (sex) seems less central than it used to be. Hence, Gaytalk. The last slide of David—the ideal—fades from the screen, and the speaker asks, “Are there any questions?” Lots, but no doubt they can’t be answered. One must still make the connection on one’s own between Michelangelo and what waits outside, the minute one opens that screen door—the screen door past which young men ride on their bicycles, oblivious of the problems in which they play the central role, immured in youth and beauty.